A service is a logical unit of work. Services can be used to divide, into mutually disjoint classes, work that is being performed in a computing system. Each service can represent a logical business function, e.g., a workload, with common attributes, service level thresholds, and priorities. The grouping of work into services is based on attributes of the work, which might include the application function to be invoked, the priority of execution for the application function, the job class to be managed, or the data range used in the application function of a job class. For example, an electronic-business suite may define a service for each responsibility, such as general ledger, accounts receivable, order entry, and so on. A service can span multiple server instances in a clustered computing system or multiple clusters in a grid, and a single server instance can support multiple services.
Computing systems having multiple servers historically provide capabilities that allow an administrator to manually configure a mapping between services and servers (also referred to as “server instances”). Such a manual configuration may be based on system performance and/or ease of management, for example. If the mapping is not specified, all services are typically provided by all servers.
One approach to automating assignment of work in a multi-server environment attempts to group together logical transactions to minimize inter-node contention by analyzing the data access traces of an application on a single node, and providing suggestions on grouping transaction types to nodes based on the traces associated with that single node.
Based on the foregoing, there is a general need for automatically assigning services to servers in a multi-server system.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.